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The Ultimate Guide to Priceline Bidding Tips

Priceline bidding has been around forever — it’s actually one of the sites I remember accessing from dial-up AOL back in the late 90’s. And while it’s still a great tool for finding cheap hotel rooms, rental cars, and airline tickets, now there are even more resources available about how to use Priceline for bidding – making it less of a guessing game.Be sure to see the current coupon codes at the bottom of this post.

Priceline Bidding Tips

I’ve pulled together all the best links and tips for this “Ultimate Guide to Priceline Bidding.”

Here’s what you should know about Priceline bidding: (If you don’t want to participate in the bidding process, Priceline also offers regular “published fares” just like Travelocity, Orbitz and the rest of them. To purchase regular rooms/tickets/rental cars without the Priceline bidding process click here.)

How to Use Priceline Bidding

1. Determine your destination and dates.

2. Check published fares on Kayak, Orbitz or on Priceline’s main search engine (without Priceline bidding) etc. to get an idea of what prices are common for the class of hotel, rental car, flight you’re considering. (This prevents you from overbidding.)

3. Check the winning Priceline bids for top cities for the category you’re looking at. These are numbers that Priceline officially distributes based on the Priceline bidding process.

Hotel Bids Click Here

Rental Car Bids Click Here

4. Place your first bid on Priceline based on these winning prices and the prices you found in step 2 (for regular airfares/hotel/rental car). You can always bid higher later, so it’s best to start low. A good baseline for starting is at about 50-80% of the listed price.

5. At this point Priceline with either accept or reject your bid. If Priceline biddgin rejects it, follow some of the Priceline bidding strategies listed below to rebid.

Use Priceline Bidding Strategies to Search Now

If you’re ready to start searching you can use the following graphic to bid on searches:

Best Priceline Bidding Tips and Strategies

Priceline is almost always great for rental cars, but with hotels and flights you may not get the specifics (like location or flight time) that you’d prefer.

While Priceline makes you wait 24 hours to rebid, you can change the hotel class, zone, or dates to bid sooner. The trick here is that you can “game” the system by adding zones that don’t have hotels in your class (e.g., if you bid on a 4 star hotel, add a city nearby that doesn’t have any 4 star hotels in it). Details at How to Beat Priceline

Check forums to see what other deals people have gotten with their Priceline bidding. These resources are tremendous and you shouldn’t book with Priceline without first checking them out. The biggest sites for Priceline bidding are: